The Summit County market is hot – but uneven

February is typically one of the weaker months of the year for Summit County real estate sales and this year saw the normal seasonal drop. Sales in the month totaled $50.3 million dollars down 24% from $66.5 million in January. Transaction volume saw a more modest decline but was still down 17% from 127 sales to 106.
Despite those declines from January, the month was actually very strong on a year over year basis. Dollar volume was up 25% from a year ago and transaction volume was up 28%. That makes it the second month in a row in which sales have increased in excess of 20%. For the year to date both sales and transaction volumes are up 26%. Last year at this time those numbers were actually showing declines and full year 2014 gains were only 8% and 7% respectively.
Average selling prices (ASPs) also declined from the elevated January levels. ASPs for single family homes year to date is now $817,736 down from $891,931 the prior month but that still represents a .5% gain over a year ago. Multi-family housing ASPs dropped modestly from January but at $409,886 were up 18% from a year ago. Interestingly the strong market is not distributed evenly across the county. So far this year, Breckenridge has accounted for 38% of the transactions and 52% of the dollar volume up from 34% and 40% respectively last year. Pricing also seems to be strong in the Breckenridge market with the average price per square foot running at $492 versus $414 last year. Keystone also had a solid increase rising from $267 to $310. In contrast Frisco has gone from $312 to $300 while Silverthorne has dropped from $251 to $233.
Being this early in the year the small sample size can make these ASP numbers quite volatile and highly dependent of the mix of high-end versus low end sales and in the case of square footage calculations the mix of single family versus multi-family properties. In general, the price per square foot tends to decline as the size increases so multi-family properties typically have higher square footage prices. As an example, for the first two months of this year the average square footage price for Breckenridge single family homes was $354. For multi-family properties that average was $506. By the way, the high for the period was $1,208.